In order to put some more flesh on the skeleton above, let us take a look at some of the most common money metaphors in order to get to grips with the question as to just where metaphors, money and its cultural life meet. We commonly ac-cept that metaphors abound in everyday ways of talking about money itself, i.e.
money as a target domain is typically referred to in figurative terms. But money also serves as a source domain or vehicle to describe other domains. The follow-ing brief list gives a highly selective overview of some common money meta-phors:
Time is money.
Business is a game.
Our share of the pie is shrinking (wealth is a piece of the pie).
Money has no smell. (pecunia non olet) Money is the lifeblood of the economy.
The very popular metaphor of‘time is money’, which maps money onto the tar-get domain of time,“suggests that any time spent on anything other than making money is making one poorer– a very stressful perspective” (www.Metaphorol-ogy.com). As soon as this common money metaphor is reversed (‘money is time.’), a very different metaphor emerges that has quite liberating implications:
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“it reminds us that money can be used to buy time for almost any purpose. With enough of it, we can quit doing most of the things we don’t want to do, to free up our hours and days for what we are passionate about.”(Ibid.) Whereas the com-mon metaphor‘time is money’implies that any time invested [Sic] in activities that do not result in more or less immediate monetary payback is not time well spent [Sic], a mere switch in the metaphor’s order bears far-reaching cultur-al and emotioncultur-al effects, changing the ways we think about money and time.
Variations on the last metaphor in the above list, i.e.“Money is the lifeblood of the economy”have recently been applied over and over again, leading to all those bailouts designed to avoid financial meltdown, which is, of course, yet an-other metaphor, and one that comes with very alarming emotional undertones and ideological freight at that. What most of the metaphors deployed to describe the financial crisis have in common is that they conjure up a very disquieting at-mosphere amidst appalling scenarios. Causing an atat-mosphere of anxiety and fear, the crisis metaphor itself implies that the money market upheavals are themselves a matter of life and death. The same holds true for other metaphors deployed in the context of the financial crisis, with the metaphors of“financial
‘tsunami’” and bailouts helping“save everyone from the rising financial flood waters” (Phillips 2008) representing just two of the countless cases in point.
Cognitive metaphor theory sheds light on the narrative structure and the dis-cursive construction of crises, illuminating the various implications of the ‘finan-cial crisis’metaphor. Should the term‘crisis’be transferred to the world of finance, we need to above all remember that we are dealing only with a metaphor: As a brief look into the history of the concept reveals, the term crisis originates from the vocabulary and semantics of ancient medical science (cf.Winau), as Alexander Demandt points out in his seminal bookMetaphors for History[Metaphern für Ge-schichte]:“Originally it meant‘decision’and in antiquity this quite unmetaphori-cal meaning was already applied to history”(Demandt 1978: 27). However, the modern concept of crisis is not determined by this original meaning but by its de-rivative medical application:“In the writings of Hippocrates and Galen,krisis de-scribes the point of time during a course of disease at which the fate of a patient, whether he recovers or dies, is determined”(Ibid.).
This organology-related background is preserved in the modern discourse of crises in both history in general and economic and financial history in particu-lar:“Wherever a crisis is identified, a patient can be discovered as well; be it in reality or in the mind of the person speaking of the‘crisis’”(Ibid.). Thus, speak-ing of a bankspeak-ing crisis or a financial crisis is equivalent to the diagnosis of dis-ease, with the banks or the money markets being the patient whose life is at stake. The metaphor of the financial crisis, however, does not merely evoke im-Metaphors We Pay For 53
ages of disease, of a patient, and of healing; rather, the metaphorics also project both a diagnosis and a certain story or plot pattern onto the situation.
Cognitive metaphor theory conceptualizes what is involved in such a com-plex process of metaphoric projection in terms of‘blending’or‘conceptual inte-gration’.³ Foregrounding the mapping process and exploring how the source do-main is mapped onto the target dodo-main, cognitive approaches characterize metaphoric blending processes as a‘mechanism of creativity’ (Turner/Fauconni-er 1999):“Image-schematic projection creates a new virtual realm, the blend, which is no longer subordinate to either the source (vehicle) or the tenor (target) but instead creates an emergent structure that exists neither in the source nor the target domains”(Fludernik/Freeman/Freeman 1999: 387). This model does not only consider how people draw on their pre-existing conceptual and cultural knowledge when they use or process metaphors, but also demonstrates how metaphoric projection is anything but a one-sided, uni-directional affair. On the contrary, what is involved is a process of mutual integration of two distinct conceptual domains.
In the present case, both the personal sphere of illness and the economic and financial sphere of crucial changes in the money markets are projected onto this blended space, which, while bringing together the salient features of the two knowledge domains involved, “exactly resembles none of them” (Ibid., 393):
“This selective borrowing, or rather, projection, is not merely compositional– in-stead, there is new meaning in the blend that is not a composition of meanings that can be found in the inputs”(Turner/Fauconnier 1999: 398). By creating con-ceptual blends between the personal domain of illness and the public sphere of economics, crisis metaphors profoundly affect the way in which economic and fi-nancial changes are perceived and understood. They thereby suggest that the es-sential character of such changes is that of a dangerous illness in the respective system. Moreover, the choice of the metaphor largely determines the human un-derstanding of, and reactions to, the situation or transformation designated as a crisis.
Once a certain situation is metaphorically marked as a‘financial crisis’, this kind of definition or diagnosis of a situation simultaneously implies and acti-vates certain frameworks and narrative schemata. To begin with,‘crisis’in gen-eral and ‘financial crisis’ in particular implies great anxiety and insecurity, a
It is, of course, beyond the scope of the present essay to present a detailed account of cogni-tive metaphor theory or of conceptual integration network theory. For a brief introduction, see Fludernik/Freeman/Freeman (1999, 387–392) and Turner/Fauconnier; for comprehensive ac-counts, see Fauconnier (1994; 1997), Fauconnier/Turner (1998), Turner (1996), and Kövecses (2000, 2002, 2005, 2006).
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dangerous threat potentially affecting lots of people. In the case of a crisis, the climax and turning point in a dangerous development is either reached or immi-nent. As the English saying,“We must bring things to a crisis”, nicely puts it, a crisis always also represents a moment of decision-making. Thus, labeling an event as a‘crisis’not only provides a specific definition for the respective situa-tion, but also evokes certain narrative schemata, development patterns, and plots. On the one hand, describing a situation as a‘crisis’is also always a diag-nosis from which certain therapeutic perspectives and action scenarios for future development derive. On the other hand, the schemata activated interpret the pos-sible courses of events lying ahead in some specific way.
Who and what is sought after in a situation like a‘financial crisis’is apparent according to the respective culturally available crisis plots, because when talking about a‘crisis’specific actions and developmental patterns get simultaneously in-voked. Depending on the social realm of action (e.g. the economy, politics, inter-national relations), there may be different crises but the fundamental scheme re-mains the same, both from a narratological perspective and from the point of view of metaphor theory: What is required in a crisis is active crisis managers (i.e. ac-cording to the original literal meaning, physicians but figuratively speaking, poli-ticians, management boards,‘financial experts’, etc.), crisis management plans, and purposeful actions (in short: successful crisis management). Speaking about a crisis always evokes conventionalized schemata and plot patterns sketch-ing out the future course of action. For this reason, diagnossketch-ing a financial crisis always already represents more than a specific definition of the situation in ques-tion and, in retrospect, oftentimes appears a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In order to get to grips with the question of why metaphors matter when we try to understand their important role for affecting the cultural life of money, we should, heuristically, bear in mind the fact that common media talk about a fi-nancial crisis actually remains just a metaphor and that this metaphor does not just represent or embellish the world of the money markets but also fulfils exten-sive structuring, narrativizing and constructive functions–just as metaphors do in general. The medical vehicle ‘crisis’ provides particular elements or ‘slots’
characterizing the special features of crisis plots. For a start, two central mem-bers of the cast are of importance: a patient or crisis-ridden organism; and a physician or observer, who diagnoses the disease from a“privileged control-room” (cf. Hielscher 2001: 319). In the case of financial crises, the patient whose life is at stake is, of course, the banks or the countries (recently especially Greece and Ireland) that are in dire financial straits and in great need of being saved. Politicians and experts of all sorts have usurped the role of the physicians who have not only diagnosed the disease but who have also made far-reaching Metaphors We Pay For 55
decisions about what they consider the best therapy or treatment, prescribing the appropriate corresponding medication and remedies.
This already serves to show that the metaphor of‘financial crisis’implies a number of other aspects that include the following (and making no claim to be comprehensive): disease symptoms, or aspects of the crisis condition; an anam-nesis, i.e. inquiry into the medical case history of the disease (according to the patient); the diagnosis, i.e. the detection or evaluation of the kind and quality of the disease as well as the condition of the patient, which is based on precise monitoring and examination; the therapy, i.e. the identification of every possible remedy and method of treatment; and the therapist, namely somebody who ad-ministers the therapy (he or she may be, but does not necessarily have to be, the same person as the physician or the privileged observer). In addition, the meta-phor‘crisis’always evokes a number of culturally determined connotations and associations with the main such facets including: alarm, anxiety, danger, threat, disturbance, fear and concern, and a search for remedies.
The fact that the metaphor of crisis already largely pre-structures the target domain of the world of finance, and that it furthermore implies a general devel-opmental scheme with regard to the narrative pattern that potentially forms the basis of every crisis scenario, is therefore crucial to a metaphorology and narra-tology of crisis (see Nünning 2009). Cognitive metaphor theory demonstrates that metaphors not only structure the way in which we understand cultural phenom-ena and processes, they also project“mininarrations”(Eubanks, 437) onto the respective tenor or target domain. As soon as we speak about ‘crisis’, a course-of-disease scheme is invoked: “There is an identifiable beginning, which is to be understood as a cause and which starts a development which leads to a reasonable ending; disturbances of this structure provoke an extensive awareness of danger”(Bullivant/Spies 2001: 17).
Moreover, by projecting a crisis plot upon the dramatic changes and events that we have witnessed in the money markets since 2008, the metaphorical con-cept of‘financial crisis’serves to narrativize and naturalize them. The projection of crisis-plots may be understood as an interpretive strategy or cognitive process of the sort that has become known as ‘naturalization’, which makes complex economic or historical phenomena intelligible in terms of culturally accepted frames. To interpret cultural or economic transformations in terms of such cultur-ally bound plots involves a way of naturalizing changes by attributing to them a function in some larger pattern supplied by accepted cultural models. Culler clarifies what‘naturalization’means in this context: “to naturalize a text is to bring it into relation with a type of discourse or model, which is already, in some sense, natural or legible”(Culler 1975: 138). This kind of metaphoric natu-ralization is so greatly ingrained into our everyday cognitive strategies applied in
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dealing with and accounting for cultural changes that, in all probability, we are neither conscious nor hardly, if ever, notice it.
Consequently, speaking about or diagnosing a banking crisis or financial cri-sis includes not only defining the action-roles identified above but, as a result of the systematic logic and underlying mini-narration of the metaphor, also linking past, present and future in a comprehensive plot. With regard to the past, the di-agnosis of a financial crisis implies a negative, more or less teleological develop-ment towards a critical stage. By contrast, the present in a crisis-diagnosis is per-ceived and interpreted as a decisive moment and as a realm of possibilities. With regard to the future this results in a spectrum of different possibilities and poten-tial development structures, which range from the extremes of death and disso-lution of the organism in question, on the one hand, to recovery and overcoming the crisis on the other. The age-old similes for particular peoples and states are typical examples of this. Organic crisis metaphors were frequently used to de-scribe the Fall of Rome: sickly Rome lying on the deathbed (cf. Demandt 1978:
80). In the present financial crisis, banks and whole countries have been lying on their deathbeds, with‘Lehmann Brothers’and many others actually‘passing away’, while some luckier ones were saved by previously unheard of bailouts the gigantic size of which makes many minds boggle.
Apart from the already mentioned action-roles and fundamental images, the metaphoric origin of the rhetoric of crisis draws attention to further aspects which are of interest for coming to terms with the crucial role that metaphors have played for the cultural, and economic, life of money in the recent financial crises. This includes the question of the causes or the initiators of the crisis, the question of concepts and solutions, the question of selecting crisis managers and actors to find a solution for the crisis, as well as the question of the crisis-expe-rience of the respective protagonists, not to mention the cultural crisis-awareness of an era. The respective demeanor or attitude towards a crisis ranges from res-ignation and melancholy on the one hand, to euphoria on the other:“The expe-rience of a crisis can lead to the resolute refusal of accepting the impending loss and provoke the impulse to seriously defend the endangered goods; however, the experience of a factual commotion of what was valid so far can also be turned into an argument for the necessity of its downfall”(Bullivant/Spies 2001: 15–16).
It is obvious that due to the range of implications that the metaphor of crisis offers, different attitudes towards financial crises produce entirely different plots. Speaking of‘the’crisis plot would therefore be highly questionable. Rath-er, by means of the metaphoric language of crisis, a broad spectrum of possible development structures is evoked, according to which the option which actually occurs depends on the skills of the protagonist in crisis management. The spec-trum of possibilities range from the extreme of recovery or even improvement, to Metaphors We Pay For 57
versions of sitting it out and twiddling one’s thumbs in the middle (which usu-ally leads to an aggravation and worsening of the crisis), right to the other ex-treme of death and destruction, which befall not only individuals, but also em-pires (witness the Roman Empire), banks and potentially even countries as the result of a crisis.
As the above metaphorological and narratological analysis of metaphors of money and the financial crisis serves to show, such metaphors, by virtue of their more or less coherent entailments, provide a systematic way of talking about and making sense of the economic upheavals that have recently occurred on money markets worldwide. Lakoff and Johnson (ch. 2) have emphasized what they call the“systematicity of metaphorical concepts”(Lakoff, Johnson 1980: 7) and have spelled out its implications:“The very systematicity that allows us to compre-hend one aspect of a concept in terms of another […] will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept […], a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor”(Ibid.10). Metaphors“form co-herent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experience”(Ibid.,41)– and the mysterious world of finance, one might add. Highlighting certain aspects of complex economic and financial processes while hiding or even repressing others, metaphorical concepts like the‘financial crisis’serve as both sense-mak-ing devices and as“‘strategies of containment’whereby they are able to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient”
(Jameson 1983: 10).